A Practical Approach to Religion
AS a pragmatist, I cannot help but to roll my eyes every time I get asked about the existence or non-existence of god. I can certainly give you reasons why believing in god’s existence can be a good or a bad idea in a society as the one we live in, but I refuse to get tangled in the ontological discussion of the actual existence of a supernatural being. But let me clarify something, it is not that I think that this question cannot be settled — it actually might be one day — but in the meantime, I think our intellectual energy would be better spent if we focus in a far more relevant (an answerable) question: Does religion and the church have any role to play in a society like the one we live in today? While our atheist and religious friends quarrel about the deity’s existential status, we pragmatists worry about the actual effects of having to deal with religious beliefs and their institutional representation embodied in the church. For us pragmatists, religion is here to stay for the foreseeable future, so we better engage in trying to redefine it in a way that fits the current world in which we live in. Let’s the redefinition begin.
It can easily be seen and experienced in our day-to-day life that the traditional role of religion as a moralistic and commanding institution is at odds with a digitally-interconnected, pluralistic and rapidly evolving society like ours. You do not have to be an acute socio-political commentator to perceive a growing mismatch between some of the basic religious beliefs and practices and our increasingly secularized, plural, scientific and tolerant society. Even if by some inexplicable miracle we were to acquire 100% certainty that god actually exists, some of the beliefs and practices that the current manifestation of religion upholds would still be problematic for the type of society we live in today. If god actually shows up at my doorstep today to confirm his existence, I would still have to press him with a few tough questions: “So, god, do we really should refrain from using condoms? Do we really should believe that homosexuality is a contra natura? Do we really go to heaven? Do priests really have to be male only? Seriously god?”
For us postmoderns, the titanic efforts of priests and traditionalists to tag archaic moral values to our current reality and to defend beliefs that go against observable facts are just too painful and embarrassing to watch. Most of the people that I know still believe in god and are in no hurry to question their belief. However, most of them feel a total disassociation with religion as an institution or as a social actor. Religion and the church are out of touch with reality, but this is not news for anyone, we all knew that. What pragmatism can help us understand is that “getting in touch with reality” is something that religion and the church should not aspire to begin with. Different areas of culture have proved themselves to be better at “getting in touch with reality”; they have proved themselves to be better generators of moral codes or cosmic beliefs than religion is. Social observers, philosophers, literary geniuses, poets and even politicians have prove themselves more adept to come up with ways in which we should act that whatever is codified in a 2,000 year-old book (and when politicians are better than you at something you really do have a problem). In the same vein, science has undeniably showed its better fit for generating superior beliefs about our cosmic status or about the world around us than the church’s risible insights. Yet again, this should not be something religious minds or the church should be embarrassed of or care about. We live in a wired, fast paced and evolving world so the first step in religion’s pragmatic redefinition is to accept that it has no particularly sharp skills for generating moral codes or scientific beliefs. Invoking an absolute being to try to pin down for now until eternity a certain scale of values or a certain world-view will only result in embarrassment once the world around us has changed enough to expose our dogmatism.
But enough said about what religion is not good for. There is something that, from a purely pragmatic perspective, religion is really good at: helping those in need and preaching the messages of love, hope and understanding. That is something our current existential conditions require more than ever and should be religion’s “bread and butter”. The church should be transformed into an institution of love, care and assistance for the ones in need and it should abandon its unnecessary ventures into the universal values’ business or its outdated opinions about how the world really is or what happens when we die or how the blood really became wine or how the virgin was really a virgin. There was a time when religion’s involvement in these ordeals was necessary and useful, but today, other areas of culture have proved themselves to be better fitted for those tasks. For as long as religion insists that it has insights into how things really are or into which moral values we ought to follow, it will do nothing but keep hurting its already tarnished reputation. This is a fact and religion should happily accept it and reorient itself to what it is best at: highlighting that we are all in this together, that there is a natural tendency in human beings to care for each other and that love for our fellow humans is a feeling worth having and promoting. You do not need a fixed moral scale and static cosmology to achieve this; you just need a firm belief that every human being deserves love, compassion and help when in need. I am sure this is a practical approach to religion that a perfect being will be ready to endorse.
